


the frozen city starts to glow

by metonymy



Category: Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, thoughts about places
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/pseuds/metonymy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Eleanor looks at her life and can't believe it's all real. Fifteen or so years later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the frozen city starts to glow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suth/gifts).



Sometimes Eleanor looks at her life and she has to draw in a deep breath to keep herself from flying into pieces. She has to close her eyes and trace her steps backwards until she gets to waking up in the morning, crawling out of bed, coffee and shower and checking her email with her hair dripping down her back, and then she remembers it's not all a dream.

Sometimes that slippery feeling stays with her all day. Like she'll wake up back in that crowded room, back in that town where she couldn't catch a solid breath. Like the past twenty years never happened. Like she's not an independent adult paying her own bills and driving her own car and buying her own groceries. Like she's still that girl, sad and mad and scared and defiant.

But an acute attack of temporal disorientation is no real reason to fail to show up for work, especially when she has a job she loves so much. 

(It wasn't till college that she really started to love poetry. But they never really gave them anything worth reading in high school, just bits and pieces here and there when they had a unit to complete. It was the modern stuff that got to her. Like song lyrics with no music, without the old-fashioned language slowing her down, like the economy of feeling in a really good play. Park used to laugh a little at her, at this new thing neither of them would have expected her to like. But then, Eleanor was still figuring out what she liked. Who she was when she didn't have to be constantly on guard, when she wasn't spending half her brain worrying about her mom and her brothers and sisters. 

Besides, she never minded Park laughing, because whenever she made him read a poem he would. And she loved seeing him focus on the page, those beautiful green-gold eyes locked onto the words. One of the times they broke up, they got back together because he brought her an Anne Sexton collection. They're back together now and it seems to be sticking this time.)

So she breathes in and out and finishes drying her hair in the bathroom, and bundles herself into her scarlet coat and leaves the coffeepot on for whenever Park actually wakes up, and leaves the apartment to walk to the station to catch the El to work. Maisie still thinks that's hilarious, El riding the El, and every time Eleanor thinks of her sister and feels a little warm inside. It's the dumbest thing, but it's a tiny piece of happiness. Of normality.

The noise of the city helps, the cars rushing by, the Metro hawkers calling out at the station, the rumble and squeak of the train on its tracks. The tinny music leaking out of a teenager's headphones, the little kid narrating the whole ride to his mother. The familiar path from the station to the campus, the smell of the linoleum in the old building where the English department is housed, the chipper greeting of the department assistant as Eleanor pulls off her gloves and checks her mailbox for any late papers, the quiet and dusty smell of her office and the books on the shelves and the mug that Ben bought her for Christmas last year. Everything pulls her out of the past and fastens her firmly to the present. Everything is here and now and not back then and there. Everything's going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! I saw this prompt on the Dear Yuletide Writer list and this treat just sort of fell out of my head. I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
